


Limerence

by Maria_and_Aguilars_Codex_1492



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Character Death, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Novelization, Obsessive Behavior, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-27 20:25:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15032549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maria_and_Aguilars_Codex_1492/pseuds/Maria_and_Aguilars_Codex_1492
Summary: Limerencethe state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings.





	Limerence

Limerence 

_ the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings. _

* * *

When her mother dies something changes in Sophia.

 

There is a fear that lingers over her like a storm approaching a city. This irrational feeling that is built upon the anxiety of the situation, and as a child it's hard for her to understand completely why this is happening to her. With the death of Anne Rikkin, all of the happiness that her father had once displayed was snuffed out. His days were spent locked away in his study or leaving her with electronics to play with, and Sophia-

 

It was easy to say that all she wanted was his love. 

  
  
  


When she had brought home Oscar it had been because she loved the frail creature from the moment she saw the dog tucked beside a building as nothing more than skin and bones. She had used the dog to fill the overwhelming need to love something that would love her back regardless, and it had worked until that day he had broken free from her. 

 

She had been bit, fourteen stitches that pulled at her skin, and Oscar had received a bullet in his skull for the simple act of it. 

 

Sophia blamed herself until she could blame her father for taking control of the situation from her and even then it somehow wasn't  _ enough _ .

  
  
  


Nine years passed, the love she held for Oscar was nothing more than a memory, and now all she held was the love she had for her father. They had spent their time together when he didn't work going to sumits on Abstergo research and taking trips to buy her new equipment in France. 

 

It was because of him that she was now being able to pursue a doctorate in genetics and genomics with an internship with Dr. Warren Vidic awaiting for her. Any teenage hostility faded away with that knowledge hanging around her neck and for the past few years he had been trying to fix their relationship. 

 

He had gone to her graduation as any parent would. He congratulated her victories with pride and helped her when she thought the world would come crashing down with her failures. The man that had snapped photos of her being pushed on a swing was attempting to make up for the loss they both faced, but somehow it wasn't enough. 

 

It didn't stop the need she felt for love and to be loved back that still consumed her. Studies and science, trips and forced smiles, they could only fill that void for so long after all, because despite how she acted Sophia was human. 

 

Humans tended to want to be loved. 

  
  
  


It was only when they had been dining in Kensington that it wasn't her that had been bringing life back into her father’s eyes. The woman he introduced was beautiful, ebony long hair, fair skin, and vivid blue eyes that rivaled Sophia’s own. For a long moment she had been aggrieved that her father would find a woman who resembled her mother so closely, but the longer that Sophia came to learn more about Elizabeth Crowder the more she came to see that this woman was nothing like her mother. 

 

It remained that way for a year. 

 

Elizabeth walking eggshells around Sophia, and there came a time when her father questioned if she would act as an adult if Elizabeth joined their family. Sophia had not answered. It was easier to pretend that she wasn't losing control of the situation that she had spiraled down into once the assassins came for her mother rather than to face the truth. 

 

Sometimes it was easier to simply not be in control.

  
  
  
  


Only when her father proposed, when Elizabeth had said yes, when they had announced her  _ pregnancy _ , Sophia had finally broke. 

 

She felt unloved as what had once been her family was slowly chipping away and being replaced. The love she held for her father not being reciprocated to what she wanted it to be had left her pushing herself deeper into her work. The nights once spent at home had become nights spent in Vidic’s lab going over genetic similarities and differences from his past test subjects. The mornings she had once tried to spend with her father were now being spent studying a group of people lacking serotonin instead. 

 

The cycle didn't break until she received that fateful phone call from her father one evening. 

 

The sharp smell of the hospital had calmed her as she entered and she tried to not show how she was feeling in that moment. 

 

Elizabeth Rikkin was dead. One unlucky assassin had attacked her instead of her father reducing him back into the same state he had been when her own mother had died and Sophia felt a bitter sense of satisfaction from it. It was only when she looked down at her half-brother wailing in her arms that a new drive began to turn gears in her head. 

 

It was something she could love, something she could  _ teach _ , and if she looked long enough she could almost imagine that the baby had come from her mother and not Elizabeth. 

 

That they were  _ still _ a happy family. 

  
  
  
  


Imagining that was easy for the first seven years. 

 

Jason held the same sharp, defined features and dark hair that their father had. Only his eyes were as vivid as his mother's had been and his personality was cunning, facile, and ambitious in ways that didn't seem to come from either parent. 

 

He had become the apple to their father's eye. The perfect child to follow in his footsteps. Showing more interest in trailing behind her father than looking at the models of the MAOA gene that Sophia had made. 

 

It was what made her almost malicious with glee when his blood came back matching perfectly with an assassin from the Victorian era. Father had agreed to looking into it, and when Sophia placed him into  _ her _ Animus everything seemed to fall into place. 

  
  
  
  


Whatever had once been Jason Alan Rikkin had been deduced to the same pack complex and insanity that every test subject in her facility held. 

 

It made him invalid to be released and with each session she pulled little by little from him to make sure that there was nothing left for father to love. 

 

_ Only myself _ , Sophia would think as the months blended into years behind the steel grey and white walls of the Madrid facility. As she watched her brother become someone else until he became someone else entirely. It was almost saddening to see the wasted potential that she had once thought enduring go to complete and utter waste. 

 

But Sophia had learned long ago that she didn't get everything that she wanted. 

  
  
  
  


When the DNA match for Aguilar de Nerha shows up in Abstergo’s database Sophia begins to pull up images of the man that held the Apple of Edens location within his genetic memory. 

 

The man appears in four newspapers, three documents showing his time in the foster care system, with a final document of his prison records. There is a psychological profile depicting the signs of how the man had been on the verge of being a borderline serial killer when he had been caught, and that his hate for violence against women was backed by the need to have saved his mother from his own father. 

 

Callum Lynch is the most perfect example of violence within people that she had ever seen out of the hundreds that she had taken over the years. 

 

She pulls at his weaknesses for his mother and women in order to get his eyes only on her. She removes the descendants of Maria from the rehabilitation wing to the upper wing where she can keep them away from him. 

 

She gives him his mothers necklace and she even holds his hand like a child when he falls unconscious.

 

_ She offers him a new life.  _ Only it's one with him by her side rather than the one free of his past that he will expect.

  
  
  
  


It’s all for the sake of the Apple at first.

 

Then when her father gives her a knowing look that she understands that it's more than that. That he has seen right through her need to keep this one alive more than she ever did the hundreds that had fallen into her care before.

 

She wants Callum Lynch to love her. 

 

More than her father or Oscar or the remains of her brother. It’s almost an obsession by the time he comes to assassinate her father and she can't stop the need that enters her. 

 

She wants him to  _ kiss _ her or  _ kill _ her. Perhaps deep down she wants both from him. She wants to know why he gave her a last chance, how he knew her mother's nickname for her, and most of all how they are connected from the ancestor that had her face.

 

She wants him to give up his past and Aguilar until nothing remains of the man that had committed murder.

  
  


But Sophia tends to not get what she wants. 

_ Not even love, _ she thinks as a pool of blood forms around her father. 

**Author's Note:**

> When reading the novelization I noticed that Sophia was very infatuated with literally anyone or anything that had the ability, in her mind, to reprocriate love. The first strong emphasis was on her father, then we learn about Oscar the Dog, then it shifts back to her father and Callum. 
> 
> It all seemed to come from her mother's death and by the end of the novelization I was left feeling that her character was almost obsessed. Only what had once been directed towards her father had by the end shifted to mainly Callum. She seemed to ignore the flarring signs of their relation for the fleeting possibility of what if they could have been lovers and what if the assassin that she had seen had connected them as lovers (rather than the more obvious factor of being related). 
> 
> There was also this internal power grab that wasn't seen in the film very much for Sophia. In the novel, when Sophia would be in control of a situation and something went wrong she would blame it on her father trying to take control. Which happened up until the end of the novel. Then in the times when Alan Rikkin would be in control, where it was logical as he was the CEO, Sophia would throw almost a tantrum of how she never was in control. 
> 
> Those two factors changed how I had always been writing her in character studies from the film, so I shut the book having to write this. 
> 
> There might be a second chapter, a part two, but I am going to see how this goes before continuing to write for what the novel gave.


End file.
